1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods of generating multimedia presentations, and more particularly, to a method and related system for generating a presentation according to number of beats in background music.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Multimedia technology is rapidly advancing, bringing levels of digital media integration previously unseen and unheard of. Images, text, and video clips are set to music to generate presentations that stimulate clear communication with their audience. And, as networking technology is improving, with increased available bandwidth and better compression, access to higher-quality multimedia content is becoming ubiquitous through the Internet.
Production of such multimedia presentations is often performed within a multimedia presentation development environment. The development environment allows a presentation designer to add, modify, coordinate, or delete the music files, digital images, video clips, and text that go into their presentation on-the-fly, while also providing on-demand previews of their work-in-progress.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a diagram of a presentation editing interface according to the prior art. One often painstaking aspect of presentation design is arranging display of the digital images, video clips, or text over the course of the digital music. In FIG. 1, the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis shows layers for assigning media. Typically, the designer will assign a start time and an end time to a particular media element, with one or more media elements, e.g. an image, text, or a clip, assigned to each layer, e.g. Layer 1, Layer 2, etc. As shown in FIG. 1, the presentation begins with an element on Layer 1, followed by an element on Layer 2, which is then followed by an element on Layer 3. The elements on Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 disappear, i.e. are no longer displayed, at the same time. The presentation ends with an element displayed on Layer 70.
The conventional presentation editing interface has a major problem. Namely, it is desirable for the multimedia elements to be assigned to the time axis in correspondence with the rhythm of the music. However, the start time and end time of each element are assigned manually, which means that the designer must alternately assign/modify the start/end times and preview the presentation, listening carefully to make sure that the elements are displayed and disappear at appropriate times. In FIG. 1, only one element is assigned to each layer, but in practice, each layer could have many elements, and the example of seventy layers is within normal expectations for this type of presentation. While the process described above may be reasonable for a small number of elements, as the number of layers and elements increase, matching each element to the music becomes an excessively cumbersome task.